Since we have to follow the biographical record, I defended my prospectus a couple of weeks ago and am now ABD. Not that my ten pages of flimsy generalizations about Henry James and Gertrude Stein needed much defending from my dissertation committee; mostly the English professors just wanted to ask the philosophy professor about his perception research. (”Wow! So, say if you took someone and plugged his ears, and put him in a suit where he couldn’t feel anything, would his vision change? Would he fall over?”)

Then everyone signed a green piece of paper and I quit the ivory tower for the year. Now I’m back in Reno paying off loans, because if the personified world is going to give me stupid onuses, at least it gives me equally stupid ways to carry them. But I got immediately sick of spending my time instrumentally, so I’ve been working on the most useless thing I could think of, which is sphinx that riddles you about verbs. Since I’m neither a real programmer nor a real classicist, I expect never to derive any benefit from it whatsoever.

I just learned that the reason I found nothing online about the Judith Butler book (April 18 below) is cuz the sign was incorrect and the book is "Nevada Belle and the Forgotten Women of the West.” So:

1) There is in fact an annual Jim Butler Days celebration at the mining park for Judith Butler’s great-grandpappy who founded Tonopah in 1900. They unveiled a statue and stuff like that.

2) The notice about the reading was attached to a telephone pole. Earlier that day I had seen a raven carry a sparrow’s corpse to the top of the pole and start to tear at it like a great black dinosaur. A spume of feathers drifted over the Best Western parking lot, blowing east, because there was a cold front moving in.

Texts and images copyright (C) 2013 Paul Kerschen. Layout adapted from the Single A Tumblr theme by businessbullpen. The Greater Roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus) has zygodactylic feet, leaving X-shaped tracks with ambiguous direction. The Pueblo and Hopi used the X symbol to mislead evil spirits. Border folklore in the early twentieth century held that a roadrunner would lead a lost traveler back to his path. In Mexico the roadrunner is known as paisano, countryman.